Family Medicine and Comprehensiveness of Care: What are the Risks of Declines in Scope of Practice?

The late Barbara Starfield declared comprehensiveness – caring for patients and families across the spectrum of their lives and providing most of the care that they need – to be one of the four foundational virtues of primary care. Family medicine has long prided itself as being the most comprehensive of the primary care disciplines, with training to care for patients across the widest array of health care delivery settings and services, and from “cradle to grave.” Many of us cherish this breadth and depth as fundamental to our specialty choice and attribute broad scope of care as one of the things that brings us joy in practice. Despite this, there has been a general reduction in the scope of practice among family physicians over the last 20 years. Fewer family physicians care for pregnant women; see children; and attend to the care of their hospitalized patients.

Search Our Recent Publications
By |2021-07-21T13:41:55-04:00March 30th, 2020|